You’re an artist. You don’t have to stop being an artist just because you’re marketing your work. Keep being creative in everything you do. It’ll be more fun and more productive.

People deal with death and loss all the time. Yet writing requires us to tap into something eternal within ourselves, something undying that is always seeking expression.

It shouldn’t be hard to be yourself. What else could you possibly be? Yet writing, and the arts in general, have taught me like nothing else that being myself requires as much trust as anything I’ve ever done.

Sometimes our stories don’t meet our readers expectations of what a story is supposed to be. That’s okay. Our job is always to meet our own expectation. It’s all we can do anyway.

Whatever we think about other writers, we think about ourselves. Never call an author whose work you don’t enjoy “bad.” It’s only a matter of time before you look at your own stories and believe they stink and that you have no talent.

Getting feedback from writing groups, beta readers, agents, and editors is just fine. But once the story or book is finished, it’s okay not to listen to criticism. It’s time to move on, and hopefully hear from the readers who liked what you’ve done.

Sometimes in life it can feel like our choices don’t matter. But writing teaches us that all our choices matter, the big ones and the small ones. Those decisions we make are the focus for our creative power.

Writing is all about asking questions and waiting for answers. But we don’t want to ask the wrong questions, the ones to which we only want one answer, like: Am I any good?